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David Frankfurter brought his family to Ra'anana, Israel from their native Sydney, Australia in 1992. He is a business consultant, corporate executive and writer who frequently comments on the Middle East conflict.
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By David Frankfurter
April 21, 2004
Since the Roadmap's inception, the Palestinians have consistently claimed that they accept it, but refused to implement their responsibilities under it.
Former Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) proudly declared in his resignation speech that Roadmap obligations were not milestones, but obstacles to be removed: "The road map calls for the unification of the security services. We surmounted this obstacle. It called for striking and uprooting the organizations. We surmounted this obstacle, too..."
So it was no surprise that, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced last December that in the absence of a Palestinian partner for peace, he would start unilaterally disengagement from the Palestinians and their terror, the Palestinian leadership reacted with "dismay and fury."
Since then, of course, the Palestinian leadership has realized that this may have been a tactical error, and have been playing up the benefits of such a withdrawal - and the military voices have been declaring it a hands-down victory for terror.
Just as Sharon's proposed withdrawals are from places that he knows will not be viable in a long-term peace solution, so the concessions he sought are those that the Palestinians had previously clearly 'hinted' that they would be prepared to make. Nevertheless, Arafat and his merry men started foaming again as soon as there was even a suspicion that the U.S. could recognize some of these Israeli positions as legitimate - even in the framework of the Roadmap. This, the Palestinian leadership was reported as saying, would be 'the end of the Roadmap'.
One might suppose that with that obstacle out of the way, we may be able to achieve peace - but they clarified even before Bush announced his support for the Sharon plan. It would "lead to the destruction of the chances for the peace process and security and stability in the region. It will also restart the vicious cycle of violence in the region and end all the agreements and commitments that have been signed."
How inconvenient. An end to the Roadmap, which the Palestinians have already declared to be a roadblock to peace. An end to all the signed agreements and commitments - not one of which Arafat has ever felt the need to meet. Restart the vicious cycle of violence. What a joke. As if it ever stopped. Over the just ended Passover holyday week alone, the IDF reported it had prevented more than TEN individual terrorist attacks - including a Jewish Holy Day attack on the Jewish community of Netzarim, a 16-year-old boy wearing a 25-kilogram bomb vest, two potential female suicide bombers who would 'cleanse' themselves of prior immoral behavior, and a plan to introduce AIDS infected blood to a suicide bomb.
The only thing that I can be grateful for is the anti-terrorist fence, which has some effect in separating me from these double-talking Palestinian 'leaders'.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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